Volodymyr Zayets: A Ukrainian Postmodern behind the Iron Curtain

Volodymyr Zayets:

A Ukrainian Postmodern behind the Iron Curtain

Oleh Shynkarenko, University of Pécs, Hungary

Abstract

This article argues that the Ukrainian science fiction writer Volodymyr Zayets (1949–2003) was an unwitting postmodern writer, one who registered the collapse of modern hierarchical order without access to the theoretical vocabulary that named it. Zayets’s work was never considered postmodern in Ukrainian literary studies: he was considered a science fiction writer whose works were published mainly in children’s literature publishing houses. However, Zayets diagnosed the Soviet hierarchy and its institutions as decorative survivals that continued to function ritually after their legitimating core had died. Reading his major novellas, Plaster Cramp (1990) and Heavy Shadows (1991), alongside the collection The Temponauts (1986), my article traces several features that Zayets shared with Western postmodern theory. It argues that Zayets reached these positions independently, through lived experience of late socialism rather than through Lyotard, Derrida, or Baudrillard, making him a rare case of postmodernism arrived at symptomatically.

About the Author:

Oleh Shynkarenko is a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Pécs, Hungary, where he is writing a dissertation on Ukrainian science fiction. His articles on the subject have appeared in Slavia, Információs Társadalom and Galaxies. He is currently interested in how Ukrainian writers of the Soviet period used science fiction to say what could not be said openly.

ORCiD: 0009-0001-1690-8967

Personal Website: https://shynkarenko.netlify.app/

Author’s Website on Ukrainian Science Fiction: https://sci-fi-ua.netlify.app/

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Published: 2026 – 10 – 15